I Know You
by Kasmi Kassim
Summary: Otabek knows Yuri more than he knows how to explain. And Yuri might not say it, but maybe, he also knows Otabek more than he knows how to explain. Published in honor of Denis Ten, who was taken from us too soon.


**Author's Note:** I wasn't going to publish this one, but I decided to honor Denis Ten's memory by publishing and nodding at Ten's heritage (descended from a Korean resistance fighter during Japanese colonialism) in Otabek, who was based on Ten. Thank you for reading. Fly high, Denis.

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 **I Know You**

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 **By Kasmi Kassim**

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When he first meets Yuri, Otabek is a red-faced pre-teen struggling to keep his humiliation from leaking through his pores. Every chastising word is like a cracking whip that leaves a scar of shame on his back, every sweatdrop betraying his inferiority.

Yuri is a limber young thing, proud and perfect, and everything that Otabek wishes hatefully that he could be.

Their gazes cross, and Otabek realizes that Yuri doesn't see him at all. His eyes have no room for lesser beings strangled by their own mediocrity. They're gold and distant against the sunset, and he's in a universe all on his own, and he could be stretching right now in the middle of Siberia as the wolves as his companions and he would still be stretching with that deadly poise like a soldier marching to death.

And Otabek thinks: hey, I know you.

There is no way to meet a soldier marching to certain death. Not unless he can equip himself similarly, and in this route, he's already lost. He is not forged in Russia's snows or drunken grief at the hearths. The grandeur that stands against Siberian blizzards and the beauty that unfurls with desperate tenacity are Yuri's birthright.

So he leaves.

His homeland is a place on the map that announcers on air don't bother to learn to pronounce. It's a place where people ask with a squint whether the people herd goats or – what do they eat, exactly. It's a place that people are quick to try to define as having been "influenced" by this powerful country or that, a country out of the precious few that they bother to know. The people of his home watch him with multichrome eyes, wind-swept hair, and colors that speak to him of beauty, colors that are barbaric thatched cloths to those that go to competitions to watch him skate and pretend that their bland food is fancier than his.

He picks up a colored cloth and wraps it around his waist, watches it flap in the wind.

"New costume?" his sister jokes, and he smiles faintly in return. He thinks of a 10-year-old in the sunset with beauty forged in frosty fire, and thinks: I will see you again.

He digs his roots into his homeland. He cannot meet Yuri by ascending to celestial songs in Russian cathedrals, but he can dig himself deeper into the earth and listen for the beats of his people, the many tongues that meet and mingle in the winds and scatter in song. He may not have the grace of a ballet dancer, but he has the warrior blood of his forefathers, resistance fighters roaming through rotten snow for a chance for blood to spill free. He has the wailing grief of forgotten sisters, tenaciously living on under oppressive rule for hope to one day bloom. He watches his sister take down the colorful fabrics in the wind, and sinks his body lower onto the earth, and dances with the wind in his hair.

"How will you win by insisting on our ways?" His mother asks. "It will make us proud, but you will not go far. It's a white man's sport, figure skating."

His choreographer sighs. "It's a good program, but you're gonna be that exotic guy with the exotic costume from some backwater country, looking…uncivilized. They won't pay attention beyond that."

Otanbek tightens his boot laces. "I'll make them pay attention, then."

Especially the boy with swan limbs and blades in his eyes.

Otabek is not a genius. He does not have the environment, or the money, or the support, or the culture for it. They tell him that it's only thanks to his talent that he's even come this far. Every step of the way is a fight. Rink hours, coaching time, step sequences. The ache in his joints, the rush of the walls as he skates toward them in the rink, faster, harder, until he veers away just in the nick of time.

"You motherfucker!" his coach shouts as he throws himself into a jump. "One of these days you'll skate into a wall and smash your brains out!"

He glides right past his coach, because there is no time. He's used to running into walls, after all.

What's worse than walls is the silence. The blank look of the audience, the stutter of the announcers that struggle to pronounce his name, or worse, don't bother to try. The confused looks and pointed fingers at his costume, the blinking at the music. Walls, he can smash. The silences, not so much.

Perhaps there is a reason figure skaters tend to be socially minded. They cannot stand the silence. They want to stand at the center of attention, rouse the audience into supporting them, build rapport amidst the performance. It's theatrical. It's a perfect stage for big egos. And fragile ones.

"Please stop staring at the cameras and actually say something," his sister begs. "You know, like a real person."

He doesn't know how to sell himself as an entertainer. Skating, he can do. It's the only way he knows how to let out the screams of his stories, the songs of his heritage. But off the ice, how is supposed to channel what he stands for, who he is? Words cannot do them justice, so he keeps his mouth shut. And if the world misunderstands, well, it's not like they really cared to understand anyway.

So when he sees Yuri spitting some hateful word or another to an intimidated journalist in the hotel lobby, Otabek stands in front of the elevator and watches. He is unapologetically – performatively, even – hostile, camera or no camera. And the words that come out of that mouth don't mean a thing. He says them because he doesn't know how to do his feelings justice, and Otabek thinks: hey, I know you.

He hadn't gone out that morning for the express purpose of stalking him, not quite, but it's not all innocent either. The boy slouches now, as if he can't be bothered to carry himself through the world outside the rink. Otabek wonders what has happened during those years to make those eyes grow darker and his war to point inward. He wants to make those pointed daggers face outward again, against the self, so he follows, and when Yuri is alone, he offers a hand.

He knows that kindness is what Yuri needs, but not what he wants. The boy isn't used to being kind to himself, and doesn't know how to trust it when he sees it. So he wraps it in a stoic face and a cool leather glove, offers a ride through deafening winds.

Yuri accepts.

It's almost poetic, how they end up watching the setting sun together. Yuri glances at Otabek, wanting to dull his blades and not knowing how. Otabek knows that he would recoil at the sight of softness, so he shoves his words ruthlessly past the blades in his eyes, the bared teeth of his words, and offers a steady hand.

I don't need you, his hand says. You're free to refuse. But if you accept, I will be for you.

Yuri takes the hand, and Otabek wonders how many times this boy had really been offered this.

"Do you even like skating?" Otabek asks over tea. He hides an amused smile behind his cup because the boy obviously has no idea that this is a date.

Yuri squints at him. "What a stupid question," he says over a sip, and Otabek can't bite down the smile. Perhaps Yuri also knows him as intimately as Otabek knows Yuri. And really, it was a stupid question. He knew the answer before he asked.

There are things they like, such as music through earphones. A walk in the park with white pigeons flying about. A warm cup of tea.

Skating isn't about liking. It's not even about enjoying. It is love with oneself. It is broken bodies, tears in locker rooms, shouting in an empty rink. It's quiet nights that never end, years that can never come back. Hopeful eyes all around him, the weight of them shackling his steps into a stumble.

It's vicious, it's addictive, and it's a war, and it's perhaps the closest thing to love that any of them knows.

If Yuri is filled with wonder at Otabek smiling and speaking over tea with him, he doesn't show it. He, in turn, cracks open like those Russian egg doll things, and starts pouring out emotions. Thoughts he doesn't say in front of the camera. Feelings he would never be caught dead admitting.

None of the new information is a surprise to Otabek. So he focuses more on the glint of lamplight in Yuri's eyes, the way his face moves when he talks. The way his mouth quirks to bite down a laugh, the way he eats as if declaring war against food. He doesn't even mind the Russo-Japanese couple crashing their date, because he gets to see Yuri sputter indignant at the news of the engagement.

The Japanese skater looks about to faint, so there's a bit of work to be done on that front, with all that repression, Otabek thinks. But then again Yuri is sputtering in outrage he knows isn't true, so he's got some repression here too. But it's okay. He can work with that.

"The friend thing, why not the Thai one?" Yuri says on the phone that night because when he gets an idea in his head, of course he can't wait. Otabek turns on the lights and sits up on the bed, and switches the phone to speaker mode.

"Now that's a stupid question," he says wryly. Yuri answers with silence. So he knows too, then. He sees himself in Otabek too.

"Does it get lonely?" Yuri asks. Otabek deliberates. It's an obvious question, but he thinks maybe, he can help Yuri admit it too, if he does.

"Not as much, no." He looks out the window at the darkness beyond the hotel room. "Not anymore."

Yuri is silent, but Otabek can hear the me, too in the air.

Thing is, there is more to Otabek's watching Yuri than simply seeing himself in him. It's the strength rippling beneath the beauty, the adamant refusal to let the audience see anything but ecstatic grace while he bruises and breaks. It's the endless courage to open to something new. Like what he does when he skates his next program, and his demeanor is changed. He not so much throws himself onto the ice as if it each moment were his last; he moves with the ice, steady and sure, and Otabek watches in wonder, and thinks: you are so beautiful.

Because Otabek is many things, but he's not conceited. He may look at Yuri and see himself, but more than that, he is in awe. The boy's suicidal brashness is courage packed in a pubescent body, his hostile distance a veil around tender yearning. He wants to make Yuri look at him when he feels the ice slipping beneath his feet, and give him a brief infinity of understanding, anchor him when he feels uprooted. He wants him to fly on the ice and translate the beauty of his soul into a language the rest of the world can understand. He wants him to be loved, yes, but he also wants him to shine without needing it.

Yuri does. Otabek knows he didn't do it for him, but they did glance at each other for that brief eternity before he performed, and he would like to think that Yuri knows that he's out here, watching, and it helped ground him.

Yuri comes to his hotel room that night.

He holds the gold medal in his hands, and it looks so heavy on his long fingers that Otabek steadies him by the arms when he opens the door to find him there.

Yuri blinks up at him, and down at the hands at his arms. Otabek releases him slowly.

"I just wanted," Yuri starts, and stares down at his medal. His hair falls into his eyes.

Then he finishes the internal war and straightens like a soldier. Otabek is occupied with soft wonder and doesn't realize what Yuri is doing when he raises his hands, and hangs the medal around his neck. Cold metal sits heavily between his ribs, and he blinks down at Yuri, who steps back as if to inspect his handiwork. Otabek grabs him by the arms before he can move further away.

He would ask what this is for, but he knows. And Yuri wouldn't be able to articulate it anyway. He watches as Yuri's eyes flit around to anything except Otabek's face. He doesn't pull away, but he doesn't know what to do either. So Otabek takes the step they both know is next. He pulls Yuri gently. Yuri lets himself fall against Otabek's chest.

"I'm okay," Otabek whispers into his hair, and Yuri grasps his shirt at last, finding ground beneath his feet.

"Still not fair," he says muffled into his shirt. "Fucking JJ-flation."

Otabek smiles and rests his chin on the golden head. "I got something better."

To that Yuri nods, because he doesn't know what else to say.

They part ways without kissing, because that's the line Otabek will not budge on unless Yuri makes the move first. Yuri doesn't, because he's still young and confused and afraid, and it warms something Otabek's chest because he cares enough to tread with caution. He gives a reassuring squeeze of the boy's arm before they part.

"Next time we meet," he says quietly, "we'll have tea again."

They part without another word, but it is enough. Otabek climbs the hill to where his sister awaits with colors flying in the wind, and dreams of a boy with golden eyes.

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 _ **The End**_


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